


retrograde

by mstigergun



Series: Inglorious [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gambling, Gen, Grooming, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Sexual Abuse, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:03:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mstigergun/pseuds/mstigergun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>For the span of a breath, Leonid is still young enough: he emerges from the scullery, flushed, sweat prickling at the back of his neck, gathering in the small of his back. Aldon’s hand pressed there, possessive. “You’ve always been remarkable,” he breathes, hot and sweet, against the curve of Leonid’s ear. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>The next moment, everything changes.</i></p><p>Prompted: A character’s thoughts and feelings while they were at their lowest point, and how someone in their life helps them overcome it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> Please mind the tags!
> 
> Thanks to [weyrbound](http://weyrbound.tumblr.com) for prompting this, though she didn't know what she was getting in to.

_**i** _

He’s seventeen. Barely. Such a fresh change that he can still taste the delicate cake his parents bought for him if he closes his eyes; can feel the crumbs that gathered in the corners of his mouth as his siblings laughed and laughed and his parents kissed his forehead. Feel the familiar thudding of his heart when a package arrived late at night, something for his eyes only.

_Seventeen and still the most beautiful boy in the city_.

Between the words, an assurance. One he’s kept pressed to his breast this past fortnight – the thick paper of the card, its jagged little letters. The gift, a silken robe as gold as the autumn sun and shorter still, is one he’s been expecting to have need of.

He keeps it tucked beneath his pillow each night. Awaiting the familiar rapping against the panes of his windows, or else a courier calling him away on some business prettied up to sound legitimate.

Instead, nothing. Only the feel of the fabric against his cheek, the rich smell of it when he inhales deeply enough – sandalwood, smoke, and bergamot. The latter fades before he receives that knock, the tapping of knuckles against his window.

“An intimate gathering,” the messenger says around a crooked smile. And then he’s gone, a shadow into the night.

It’s a routine with which Leonid is deeply familiar. He’s seen that same face for years, has let his feet trace the same path as he tries to steady the quickening beat of his heart. The nervous tingling in his fingers, the twisting anticipation in his gut – at once sickening and alluring. Something dangerous that calls him.

It must be how mages feel all of the time, he thinks. It’s enough to make him jealous for the span of a breath, before he changes his mind. Why be in a circle when he can have the same feeling out _here_. When it’s far less _intellectual_ , instead becomes something entirely physical.

The Fade can go fuck itself. He has Aldon, and Aldon is significantly better. Impossibly, wondrously better. It’s a forbidden thought, this insistence circling his mind. Everything Leonid might ever want – not even a desire demon could outdo the man who’s finally asked Leonid to join him again.

Leonid traces his way through familiar alleyways to the estate’s garden entrance. The lights of the manor are all on, curtains glowing through the mullioned windows. He pauses for a moment, smoothing the wrinkles from his clothes. Inside of his chest, his heart stutters; a breath to steady himself, to put on the face of wide-eyed cockiness Aldon so adores.

It was one of the very first things Aldon had directed him toward. _We’ll see if we can’t sharpen that tongue_ , he’d murmured, thumb lingering against the swell of Leonid’s lower lip in the quiet alcove into which they’d withdrawn at the ball. _How I do love a creature with some venom. With a wicked mouth_.

_I can be wicked_ , Leonid had insisted, teeth scraping the pad of Aldon’s thumb, eyes wide and heart hammering. And so he’s become – so very wicked that it’s delicious, all of this this. To walk this familiar route, to emerge cloaked in shadow, to hide away each and every scrap of what passes at these parties, what has passed between he and Aldon for years, from the rest of Thedas. A forbidden world in the city, barred to those who don’t claim citizenship.

Leonid pushes his way through the chill night and makes his way through the gardens. Always Aldon leaves the servant’s entrance open, so that Leonid might enter with no one on the street being all the wiser.

_You know how they are_ , he’d said when first Leonid learned this secret way into the house. A warm, soft palm against the line of Leonid’s jaw – still soft, then, still curved like a boy’s. _Jealous, of course. Petty. We can’t have that, can we, Lenya?_

His jaw has sharpened now, but the feeling that rests beneath his sternum – like the flutter of feathered wings, soft and frantic – has stayed the same. Will always stay the same. And now that he’s of age, he’ll be able to do as he wishes. As Aldon has promised, the secrecy was a veil necessary for but a moment, to staunch the naysayers who simply wouldn’t understand.

No one understands. The world is shaped for just the two of them, and that’s precisely the way he likes it. Forever and ever, like something from a fairy tale. But in place of heroes, they can both be villains, Leonid thinks, slipping into the quiet servants quarters. His messenger is perched on the edge of a table, rolling tobacco in thin paper: a figure so cloaked in shadow Leonid hardly notices him.

What awaits is far sweeter and far more wicked than the heroes from the stories. Finally, he can claim all this as his. Through the dark of night and in the waking day. A need so very sharp it pricks like the edge of the knife, but it’s a pain he welcomes, one that lingers like poisoned honey on the tip of his tongue.

_Mine. At last_.


	2. ii

_**ii** _

The fall comes just as hard.

For the span of a breath, Leonid is still young enough: he emerges from the scullery, flushed, sweat prickling at the back of his neck, gathering in the small of his back. Aldon’s hand pressed there, possessive. “You’ve always been remarkable,” he breathes, hot and sweet, against the curve of Leonid’s ear.

The next moment, everything changes. They emerge into a gathering – intimate indeed, lights all dimmed to mere suggestion, occluded by silken scarves, sweet smoke redolent in the air. Pairs and trios of bodies are gathering throughout the rooms. Some, heads bent together in quiet conversation; others, bodies bent together in more furtive movements, throats opened by breathy sounds indecent in even this sort of parlour.

Leonid might be surprised, but he’s been to this sort of gathering before. Has sampled its wares at the behest of his lover. How shocked he’d been the first time. Now, his interest might prickle – but he feels none of the twisting unease he did when first the sights were arrayed before him.

Except for the cool space where Aldon’s hand had been resting: that stirs something within him, a unsettled coil within his gut. The absence of Aldon’s palm is noticeable, a void right at the dip in Leonid’s lower back. Gone, and he’s never before felt a loss quite as keenly, has never known the extent to which that firm, guiding hand steered him through these dangerous waters, these dim red tides.

Aldon tries to pass Leonid off on someone else. Nudges them closer in the parlour, taking the other man’s hand – some count from somewhere incredibly unimportant – and placing it firmly on the muscle of Leonid’s thigh as they sit too close, far too close, on a threadbare little chaise. “It was Lenya’s birthday just two weeks ago,” Aldon murmurs, tipping his mouth close to the count’s ear. “Did you know? Seventeen!”

Leonid’s skin prickles. The count’s wicked mouth curls. “Only seventeen? And already so worldly!”

“Worldly enough to know a washed-up count is below me,” Leonid says, slipping out from under the count’s hand. His gaze skitters to Aldon – has his rudeness found its mark, his insistence that he be uncooperative? – but already Aldon has left the room, drawn to deeper, plusher shadows within the sagging house.

The count, for his part, finds Leonid’s comment droll. “My darling,” says the man, “I might be – should that be what you wish. A boy so _very_ lovely –”

It’s enough. “Has better things to do with his time,” Leonid says, surging up and moving away. The words can barely slip past his lips as barbed as he wants them to be. Already, his blood curdles in his veins, his stomach tied in knots. He can still feel the imprint Aldon’s fingertips left on his hipbones, the rasp of his stubble across the back of Leonid’s neck, and already he has been shuffled on to someone else. Even the bourbon he’s been downing fails to calm the jittering of his nerves, this jagged, panicked energy.

He shoulders his way past couples already partially unclothed. Stumbles on a pair hidden away in a shadow beneath the ancient grand staircase. In the half-light, the boy’s face falls half to shadow, pale light catching the edge of his cheekbone, the curl of his lashes.

_Like looking in a mirror_ , Leonid thinks. _But three years past_.

He keeps moving. The house is as familiar to him as the shape of his own hand, as the route from his parents’ manor to this one, as the feeling of Aldon moving against him.

Except all of it is made strange. He is bereft, a ship cut loose from its mooring, whose sails catch errant and irregular gusts. He may think he catches glimpses of things intimately known – the shape of the rooms around him, the sounds of pleasure in the air, the smell of sweat and perfume and sickly sweet liquor – but none of it makes sense. Stars above him inverted, none of which can guide him home.

Of course he finds Aldon in the end.

Of course he’s with someone else.

Leonid says nothing, though bile burns at the back of his throat, though his hands shake. He says nothing because –

_Seventeen and still the most beautiful boy in the city._

Not nearly beautiful enough. Or perhaps far too seventeen.

The gardens offer welcome respite. Heart thudding hard against his ribcage, blood reduced to the burn of bourbon consumed _far_ too long ago, he hunches over. Thighs burning, head pounding. Fingers dig hard at his temples, eyes prickling with –

Leonid digs the heels of his palms against his eyes, until the whole world burns in bright, oscillating colours. His skin flashes hot and cold, wildfire and the deep months of winter all in one.

A wretched, vulnerable sound lives in his throat. He will not let it out.

Behind him, the scuff of a boot against the garden tiles – softened by the weeds grown rampant. “Now, now,” says a soft voice, “It’s too lovely a night, and far too handsome a face, for _that_ look, precious.”

Leonid twists his head, from where he’s still crouched against the tangled jut overgrowing a broken fountain, and scowls through the dark. A flare of light, then the sweet smell of tobacco. He squints at the shape, peering through the shadows coalescing around him.

The servant who always appears at Leonid’s window. Who knows his way to and from Leonid’s bedroom as well as Leonid does himself.

He steps forward, the servant, taking a long drag from the rolled leaf. The embers cast his face in yellow relief against the darkness. The quiet gardens.

Leonid looks away. Blinks furiously into the night.

A heavy sound, and the man settles down next to him, kicking out his legs across the broken stones. He nudges a chip of the fountain to one side with the toe of a worn boot.

He _says_ nothing. Just puffs on his damned cigarette, breathing smoke into the air around them, as though he were a dragon. Leonid can hear the soft burning of the leaf, how the servant’s breath pulls it to ember and smoke.

It’s a rhythm, his breathing.

Leonid stares hard at nothing. Fixates instead on the sound of that breath.

Better that than – the fluttering sickness inside of his chest. The feeling of the whole world dropping out from beneath him, at once far too fast – how has this happened so _soon_ , when it seems like only yesterday Aldon was pulling him aside at an absurd ball, murmuring filthy and beautiful things against the curve of his ear – and impossibly slow. Everything reduced to this: Aldon placing another man’s hand on his leg; Aldon passing through light to shadow; Aldon with another boy’s trouser’s tugged down, his head buried forever in the crook of another boy’s neck.

_Only until you’re of age, Lenya_ , he had said so very often. Breathed against the fevered skin of Leonid’s shoulder, words pressed against the shape of his hipbone, the swell of his lips. _After that, the world will open to us. It will be ours to do with as we please_.

The hurt flares again, the dizzying pull toward an abyss he can’t fathom. Leonid’s fingernails dig crescents into the heels of his palms. He sucks down a hard breath, cold. Chokes on it –

The servant scoffs. “He’s an _ass_ ,” he says. “Not worth your upset. Not worth near the time you’ve invested into him – but what’s done is done. Best move on with things, Leonid.”

“I’m not upset,” Leonid says, breathless. “Andraste’s tits, I’m better than _that_.”

Even to his own ears, the lie is evident – words tight, ragged at the edges. The corners of his eyes prickle. He gulps down another hard, cold breath, forces it down through the knot of his stomach.

Surely he can breathe. Even he can manage that much.

He shoots the man next to him a skating look, one that doesn’t linger.

The servant’s eyebrows rest high on his forehead, incredulous.

“It’s just,” Leonid begins, forcing his voice to steady, forcing his heart to slow, “that he was – a good lay.”

A laugh, brighter than the white moon overhead. The man takes another long drag on his tobacco, then stubs the rest out on the cracked fountain behind them. “That so? Well, there are plenty of good lays to be had in Ostwick, and if you stay away from the nobles, I can promise you’ll have a much better time.”

“ _Will_ I,” he says.

“Sure you will.” Like that, the servant stands, brushing dried leaves and dust from his dark trousers off like a groom working a horse – perfunctory, but not without art. “In fact, let me beg off work – we’ll go.”

Leonid blinks up at him, this figure in the dark. Silver light catches on the dark curl of his hair, the broad shape of his eyes. Familiar, to see this face at night; to have it promise him good things, in fact. Just –

The stars inverted. What he expected to bring him home pointing him to unfamiliar waters.

“Go _where_ ,” he asks, slow.

“Oh, you’ll see. Listen, a face as lovely as yours? I promise you’ll have your pick. Come on.” A proffered hand in the dark, cast taupe beneath the moonlight.

Leonid hesitates, crouched against the cold stone, the cracked tiles beneath his boots. He might return inside, he thinks. If Aldon has finished up with his other boy, he might spare a moment –

Leonid sucks on the inside of his cheeks. Tamps down the ache beneath his breastbone, one he refuses to feel. Will not continue to feed into.

“I’d best have my pick,” Leonid says, reaching and catching the servant’s hand with his own. “Maker knows I’d be disappointed if I stumbled into a tavern filled with _your_ sort.”

Another laugh, easy. The man holds his palm for a moment, his skin warm and rough against Leonid’s. “And he’s got a wicked mouth, too,” the servant drawls, gaze flicking pointedly to Leonid’s lips. “Won’t you be popular.” A pause, then, “I’m Alec, by the way. Feel like I’ve known you for years – though you were always a little to _preoccupied_ to bother asking after me.”

Part of him wants to insist that he knew, that _of course_ he knew this man’s name, but –

He can’t pretend. Too much of what he has left in him is involved in putting on this particular mask, on walling away the feeling of – _loss_. The sharpness of absence, the weight of his own naivety. Stone by stone by damned stone, until there is nothing but the insistence that he is fine. That he won’t be broken by this frailty, this bird-boned weakness.

“If you’d been more interesting, I’d have asked,” says Leonid, once Alec has caught a serving girl passing between the servant’s entrance and the door to the back library and told her he’ll be escorting _the messere’s boy home_.

“If you’d been less _doe-eyed_ , I’d have offered.” With a wink and a grin and, like that, they’re off through the night. To deep and dark waters that have to be worlds better: without shoals to wreck himself upon, surely, Leonid thinks, throat still tight, he’ll be better for it. Surely.


	3. iii

_**iii** _

Alec’s right. They show up at a grimy little tavern by the water, and Leonid has his pick of nearly anyone in the room. A few, snared earlier in the evening and with a little more honour than some of their compatriots, are too involved to be distracted when he and Alec enter. Most take notice.

“Of course,” says Alec, thrusting a glass filled far too high with some amber liquid, “if you plan on coming back, we’ll need to have a chat about what you’re wearing.”

“I suspect I’ll need more dirt,” Leonid observes, eyes casting about the room. He takes a drink, and the rum tastes like burnt sugar and ashy coal, but it’s plentiful and that is all he cares about. Around the dim, dirty space, rowdy knots of people, or else lone patrons with hungry eyes whose mouths still curl with smiles far safer than the ones Leonid’s used to staring down. He spots a Qunari in one corner, a cluster of elves by the bar, and four dwarves engaged in a very heated game with which he’s unfamiliar – though it looks to involve a great deal of coin, from the tone of voice they’re using.

Leonid feels, for all the world, like a child in a confectionary store. If that store’s confectionary had been dropped and rolled in a great deal of filth before being put on display.

It is, he thinks, pulse roaring in his ears as he finishes his drink and moves on to another, _lovely_. Nothing like the perfumed rooms at –

He won’t even think it. Instead, Leonid gets very, _very_ drunk and spends a good portion of the night upstairs with some sailor. Out of – well, it’s either Seleny or Rialto or perhaps Denerim. He might swear he heard the man say _Ghislain_ from behind his golden teeth, but that’s not even near the water.

Besides, it’s hardly the man’s sailing prowess that appeals.

“Do the stars ever go _funny_ on you?” Leonid asks after, head spinning and body a pool of lax warmth. Sprawled naked across a bed his mother would insist needed to be set on _fire_ for the safety of all Ostwick citizens.

The man rubs his chin against Leonid’s shoulder, like a cat winding its way around beloved ankles. A delightful rasp. “Depends how far north you go,” he says, pressing an errant kiss here, another there, then, “Why? Did you want to go north? I could take you – all the way to the isles of the Boeric Ocean.”

Leonid laughs, dizzy. “The only place I’m going is home,” he says, though he lingers long enough to lose yet another hour in the man’s arms – which are well-muscled and tattooed and strong enough to hold him hard against the wall when things take a turn for the acrobatic.

He does head home, though, slipping underneath the broad sprawl of the sailor’s arm as the gray light of dawn begins to claw its way across the sky. Alec stumbles back alongside him, tucking Leonid’s hand in the crook of his elbow – like Alec’s escorting him to a ball, like he’s a _gentleman_. It’s enough to set Leonid to snorting and laughing, and Alec’s eyes sparkle and he pauses long enough to sink into something resembling a bow – if one has an imagination and is terribly forgiving – before they continue to stagger their way home. Alec even helps him manage the crawl up the lattice and the tumble back into his room. Leonid falls into bed, sheets a soft and familiar mess. His hand snakes under his pillow, yawning hard into the plush surface when –

Soft material beneath his fingertips. Leonid draws the robe out, a liquid pool of gold in the early morning light. Alec is a silhouette against the windows.

Leonid rubs his thumb across the material. Stares at it as it puddles in his lap. He looks up. “Why don’t you stay?” he murmurs.

The shadow that is Alec huffs. It is something like a laugh, and also nothing like one. “ _Right_ ,” he says. “Why don’t I _stay_.”

Leonid feels heat prickle at the back of his neck. Feels it warming the muscles of his shoulders, surging down his veins. He’s never noticed, before, the steady weight of Alec, the lithe shape of his arms, his narrow hips. But –

“You can stop looking at me like that,” Alec says, voice soft in the dim room. In Leonid’s room.

“Like _what_ ,” Leonid says, barely more than a breath.

“With those eyes. I follow my own rules. I don’t fuck nobles.”

Leonid breathes out a laugh, insubstantial, stands up and wanders across the room. “You say this now,” he says. “But you know that rules are made to be broken.”

They stand close in the gray light of morning. Leonid can hear nothing beyond the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, the shallow breaths he takes. Alec’s eyes – which are gray, maybe, or blue, or perhaps something else – study him warily. Shoulders slanted, angled away.

Leonid thrusts the robe at him. “Here,” he says. “For babysitting me. I promise I’ll be much more fun next time.”

Alec takes the robe, rich fabric caught between his long fingers. “Oh,” he says, edging back toward the open window, “I imagine that’s true. I seem to recall you’re quite the Wicked Grace player. _A face made for lies_ , Messere liked to say.”

They both hear the word, Alec stilling, neck as stiff as Leonid’s. “Liked,” Leonid repeats. Past tense. He’s not too drunk to notice. Not nearly drunk enough, in fact, a feeling that comes back to him in a rush – his desire to slide into blissful oblivion. A sniff and he shrugs, liquid. “That would be his loss, then. I’m _worlds_ more interesting than any idiot he’s liable to pick up now that he’s getting _old_.”

Something like a smile flickers across Alec’s features. The thought of Aldon has sobered Leonid enough that he can see it for what it is, though: regret, bitterness, and something like a world-weary anger.

“I’ll come by again, yeah?” And like that, Alec’s off, and Leonid turns to his bed and pretends he can’t still smell that damned robe where it lived beneath his pillow.

*

He doesn’t actually expect to see Alec again. Leonid’s clever, in at least the ways in which these sorts of things work out once they end: Alec promised he was _escorting the messere’s boy home_ , and no doubt he was commissioned to do just that. What better way to buy Leonid’s silence than to give him a sweet farewell? A servant to find him someone else to fill the void left in his life, to make pretend that they might be _friends_.

Vile, but there’s nothing to be done.

Besides, Leonid is much too proud to speak of what’s passed with anyone. And what would they say – _I told you to stay away from that scoundrel_ , his mother might hiss. His older sister shaking her head, older brother going white with fury. To bring this disgrace upon their household. To tie himself so scandalously to a man already fallen from grace –

Hardly. As much as he would like to see his family brought down a few pegs, as hateful as his parents are, as narrow and dull as his siblings are, he can surely think of better things to do with his time. Such as drinking and gambling. After all, how would he buy drink or piss away money if he didn’t have his parents’ coffers to draw from?

Just the same, the silence weighs on him like shackles. The inwardness of the hurt, how raw it leaves him – just there, beside his heart; just there, on the insides of his bones.

There is a depth to the hurt that alcohol never quite reaches. He knows because he tries to blot it out; figures that, if he drinks enough, he might very well poison the pain away. Seventeen and adrift and unable to even purge the hurt from his body, with none of the purpose he believed he would have mere weeks ago.

He’s surprised, then, when Alec materializes at his window one night.

For a sickening moment, Leonid’s heart hammers against his ribs. Has Aldon realized –

He doesn’t even allow himself to think it. Stupid. Instead, Leonid opens the pane of glass, and Alec tumbles in, rolling with one shoulder in a very clever little move. “Well,” Leonid says, after Alec rights himself. He gestures to his wardrobe with a flutter of one hand, tilting his head to one side. “Help me look suitably _rakish_.”

It’s the start of a trend, a pattern that falls into place to replace the one that had shaped Leonid’s life for years before. Deep into the night, a gentle tapping will sound at his window. Alec will tumble inside, leaping to his feet with a lop-sided grin and a plan for a tavern to visit somewhere.

Invariably, they’ll only leave when the horizon grows gray and soft, and when they’re both entirely drunk and sated. Leonid always has better luck finding a likely partner, but then Alec has only a fraction of his charm.

“It’s because you’re _mean_ ,” he slurs once, as they stumble back towards Leonid’s house – because always it’s Alec who walks Leonid home and never the other way around.

Alec’s home is one Leonid can’t visit again. Can’t even think of without feeling a keen ache beneath his breastbone, like the tip of an arrow that’s broken off. That stays buried forever, a slow and steady infection.

“People like _mean_ ,” Alec continues.

“They don’t,” says Leonid.

“They do. Trust me. I’m around enough of that to know.”

He means Aldon, of course. For a moment, they both fall silent. Then, because Alec is unfailingly bright and content, he shoves a hand against Leonid’s rib cage, pushing him off-course for a moment. “In any case, don’t go complaining. It serves you well. Maker, that _elf_.”

But Leonid refuses to let the point go, though of course Alec is right – the elf was truly spectacular. “I’m not mean,” Leonid murmurs, tipping his head against Alec’s shoulder. “I’m _hilarious_. And you adore me”

Alec doesn’t argue, slinging his arm around Leonid and dragging him back to his bed, as always. And, as always, he leaves as soon as Leonid’s collapsed across the sheets, mouth slack against the pillow.

In short enough order, Leonid’s life is – unrecognizable. He comes to realize that Alec is, as it turns out, right about nearly everything. Nobles are almost entirely unrelenting assholes; he realizes this after his mother drags him to a dinner party after a week of carousing at rowdy taverns and with people his mother would feel dirty if she even _looked_ at. Her sort of party – fourteen different utensils, perfumed and powdered guests, polite small talk – reveals itself to be nothing but empty. Worse, it’s _boring_. Not enough sex and only halfway towards enough wine.

Midway through the third course, Leonid stands and saunters off, but only after he’s plucked a bottle of fine wine from the table. He finds himself in the servants’ quarters and thrusts the wine at one of the surprised workers. “Please, you deserve this,” he insists. “You have to listen to _that_ all day? I would rather drown myself.”

Another week passes, and Leonid decides he’d best make himself far less presentable amongst the noble ranks. He would become unrecognizable, a shapeshifter turned from kept boy to a freed sinner. He spends far too much coin on a solution that bleaches the black of his hair to a gossamer silver. He has Alec help him track down a dwarf on the waterfront who’s brought his skills with ink to the surface.

His mother drops her teacup when he comes home, eyes lined with kohl, hair silver as a fox in the dead of winter, a twisting line of ink around his left wrist. “ _Lenya_ ,” she gasps, “What _have_ you done?”

“I’ve not even arrived at the _doing_ yet, Mother. Though, rest assured, that will come later.”

And it does: night after night, he scours away all the Alton made him into. Instead, he turns his wicked mouth to jibes more good-natured than political, to insults that too many of the men drawn to him find entrancing – before they realize that it’s, none of it, a show. He is unyielding, which keeps the hearts around him at bay.

Only Alec seems unperturbed, rolling his eyes and ruffling Leonid’s hair. “Still so _mean_ ,” he says, good-natured. “You may be stuck that way.”

The next month, after Leonid insults an Antivan minstrel so thoroughly that the man draws a blade on him, he admits that perhaps Alec is right. He tells Alec as much as they run from that tavern and toward another, fleeing the Antivan’s shouted threats. “I don’t _mean_ to be mean,” he says, squinting through the fog toward the sign of the Roasted Pig, which is a favourite haunt of theirs. “It just – comes out.”

Alec sniffs, nodding. One hand rests on the curve of Leonid’s bicep as Alec steadies himself. Always he drinks too much: an effort to keep up with Leonid, one that inevitably fails and too often ends with him spattering vomit in some gutter on their winding journey homeward.

Now, however, the line of his brow dips down, serious. “Yeah,” he says, slow and weighted. As though these are words he’s laboured over, thought on again and again. “We are what we’re made to be. I didn’t start out a drunk philanderer, but here we are anyway. And we both know who we have to thank for that.”

It’s the first time they’ve spoken of – any of it, what Aldon shaped Leonid into, what he apparently has turned Alec into. How readily the man molds those around them, how he cultivates the malleable and leaves them precisely as he wishes.

Of course, Leonid has sorted all of this out. That doesn’t make the mutation any less – permanent. Knowing he was made into this doesn’t stop him from _being_ it. He may colour his hair and press ink into his skin, learn card games and file off the edges of his vowels so that he sounds less of a noble prick, he may make himself into everything he thinks Aldon would _not_ want but –

Still, he is the echo of his boyhood. Years spent under the tutelage of a man more vile than Leonid had ever imagined.

What, he wonders, was Alec made into?

Leonid stays there, in the doorway to the tavern, the roar of laughter and music audible even in the dark, misty street beyond. Alec, too, lingers, his face shuttered.

A mask he wears as much as Leonid wears his own. Leonid doesn’t know how he hasn’t noticed before, that each of them walks with a mask; that each of them walks with this peculiar _weight_. They watch each other for a moment. _We are what we’re made to be_. It’s true, but Leonid has also decided to be this: someone who doesn’t have a single fuck to give. Not when the night is young. Not ever.

“If you wanted to aim a little more of that philandering in my direction, Alec,” he begins, throwing his best friend his most charming smile. Because Alec is his best friend, Leonid realizes. He may be the only friend Leonid has – but he’s exceptional, as far as they go, and so Leonid doesn’t particularly care. Better one Alec, he thinks, than all the world’s Aldons.

“Ha!” A barked laugh. “Rules are rules, you useless git – but tell you what, I _will_ buy you a drink.”

It will do.

Except that it doesn’t.

_One Alec_ , he thinks, sitting in the tavern as his head spins in time with the music. As people pass him by and try to bait him into conversation. Leonid waves them off, redirecting with snide insults and sharp jibes, and keeps watching Alec, who’s across the crowded room and talking a little too loudly to a woman who’s a head taller than he is. The firelight glints across the soft curls of his hair, broad smile flashing. His fingers tap thoughtlessly against the side of his glass, very nearly in time with the music but not quite.

Leonid watches him, and then he realizes he can’t any longer. The air is too stale, the room far too loud – and this soft, surprising thing beneath his breastbone far too new and vulnerable. He tosses back the rest of his drink, stands, and heads out into the night.

Alec finds him when Leonid’s nearly home, footsteps thudding up behind him, gasping for air when he finally catches Leonid’s elbow. “Hey,” he huffs, “ _hey_. Why’d you take off?”

“I’m tired,” he says.

“You’re never tired, Leonid. You’re seventeen. It’s impossible.”

“And you’re a worldly, what – _twenty-one_?”

Alec’s mouth twists into a crooked smile, familiar as the halo of the moon overhead. “See, now you’re flattering me. Still sore the usual vinegar didn’t work on your Antivan? There are plenty more where he came from, Lenya.”

Leonid stiffens, as if someone’s turned his spine to iron. “Don’t call me that,” he says, voice low.

Alec freezes, eyes wide. “Oh,” he says, all of the laxness gone from his frame. Neck stiff, mouth open with surprise. A flush rises in the swell of his cheeks. “Oh, I –”

Leonid turns and walks away into the fog. He doesn’t have time for this, for any of it – though, of course, what is his life but free time?

When he finds home, he makes his way straight to his parents’ wine cellar and carries a collection with him to his room. He falls asleep a bottle later, thoughts buzzing with only the void – and there is sweet relief in that. Better that than the soft thing that got him into trouble before. Than his bright-eyed friend, his nimble and clever-mouthed companion. Always nothingness over _that_.


	4. iv

_**iv** _

_Surely_ , he thinks, _it will get better_.

It doesn’t.

Either Alec doesn’t notice or he knows better than to say anything, but Leonid certainly can feel the change in himself: like waking up to find himself without a leg, made unsteady. A surprising and ugly transformation he wishes he could undo.

He devises a solution, of sorts. Leonid starts to laugh more loudly, to drink more deeply, to lose some of the discretion with which he’s sought companions for the evening. Even when Alec doesn’t materialize at his window, he takes to wandering the city on his own.

Best he throw himself into debauchery and ruin, he thinks, than lose himself to the vulnerability of his heart. Better sin than – love. Even the thought disgusts him, which is a comfort. Good to know he hasn’t turned entirely soft.

Yet. And, with any luck, his unyielding commitment to leading a life of unrepentant sin will keep him wicked and thus _safe_.

His brother is the first to notice his new routine. “Lenya,” Viktor says when Leonid yawns his way to the parlour for breakfast, though the hour of the day is late indeed. “You’re out until morning each night, but there’s not a person I’ve spoken to who knows where you’re going. Might I be daring and hope you’re keeping vigil in the temple?”

Leonid pours himself coffee, rubbing grit out of the corners of his eyes and ignoring the rotten feeling in his stomach from _far_ too much alcohol and not nearly enough food. “You, daring? I should think not. Wouldn’t want you to break now. After all, where _would_ mother and father be without their dull and dutiful son?”

Alla, who listens from the corner where she’s perched with a novel, scowls at him – something he feels rather than sees. A familiar weight. He flashes her a bright smile, though his mouth tastes of stale alcohol. Though surely his lips are still swollen from the evening’s affairs.

She snaps the book shut. “When was the last time you picked up your bow to practice? When you bothered to do anything outside of drinking yourself to a stupor?”

“It’s not just the drinking, my darling,” he purrs. “The drinking is only a _fraction_ of what I get up to. Just because I get to have all of the fun –”

Both of them scoff, a unison so inherent and insipid it defies belief.

Leonid’s smile grows sharper. He turns and makes his way back upstairs.

His siblings have always been devout, in their own ways: Alla is dedicated to order, to her weapons and her training, to the notion that she might one day command forces belonging to the Duke; Viktor, for his part, remains a dedicated scholar of the Chantry, perhaps even more faithful than the two siblings working within the institution itself.

Leonid, on the other hand, remains devoted to drink and debauchery. The concerns of the _people_ , he thinks distantly as he readies himself for the evening’s adventures. Alla and Viktor might pretend all they like that theirs are the interests that matter, but they stand a world apart. So far removed from the gutter that they wouldn’t recognize it if they tripped in.

He’s thinking bitterly of coin, of name and title and the nonsense of the whole blighted system, when there’s a soft rapping against his window.

Alec is already half-drunk when he staggers in. “Bad day,” he offers as an explanation, throwing himself across Leonid’s bed as Leonid fusses with his hair – already the colour’s fading. He’ll need to track down the alchemist again so that he might continue to horrify his mother. “Yours?”

“Other than the usual familial disappointment and their sickening sense of superiority? Nothing of note. Though of course your day has just taken a remarkable turn for the better, now that I’m in it.” He shoots his friend a quick little smile in the mirror.

Alec rolls his eyes, though he still smiles, even if the expression lacks its usual lustre. “Were you thinking dice, then? You know how I like to win coin off you.”

When they reach the Pig, Alec tips his head against Leonid’s shoulder as they push their way inside. “You’re buying,” he says. “I haven’t a penny to my name.”

So he does, and they play dice, and Leonid does his very best to lose so that Alec will at least have a silver or two to see him sated with drink. Throughout the affair, the room quieter than usual around them, smelling of smoke and sizzling fat and sour ale, Alec is – unsettled. His fingers patter against the top of the table when he’s not flicking the dice between them; his eyes jump to the door, jittering around the room. His mouth, usually caught in an eager and constant smile, falls to a frown more often than not.

“What _did_ happen?” Leonid asks, once they’re both half-slumped over with drink. The affectation of _not caring_ long since blotted out by liquor.

Alec rubs one hand across his forehead, stare distant and unfocused. “Nothing that recounting would help. I’ll find my solace in the bottom of a glass, not in you.”

“I don’t offer solace,” Leonid insists, the back of his neck prickling. Flushed at the suggestion. “I plot _revenge_. Would you like me to shoot someone? Ruin their reputation?”

“That would be easy where _you’re_ involved,” mumbles Alec, mouth curling into a good natured smile – though, like the others, it’s fleeting enough.

Too much rum and too much suppressed anger make Alec more unsteady than usual. Leonid waves away a couple prospective suitors and instead hooks his friend underneath his shoulder and half-drags him from the tavern once he begins to struggle to stay upright.

He retches into the gutter, spitting up nothing but bile and drink. Hands planted hard on his knees, nose running, eyes shining in the night.

Leonid presses a hand to the place between Alec’s shoulders. Waits while he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Alec’s hardly fit to make his way home on his own. Leonid can see that. He _knows_ it. He needs his bed and some long hours of deep sleep.

Leonid sucks against the insides of his cheeks as Alec straightens as best he can, this far gone. His stomach twists in on itself, like a banner caught in a gale: one moment, certain; the next, terrified.

His _best friend_ , Leonid thinks. And more – the cause of the weakness of his own heart. If that isn’t reason enough to do right by him, Leonid is entirely done feeling scared, he thinks. He’s nearly eighteen; he certainly has better things to do.

Leonid clears his throat. “We’ll take you home then. This is as glamorous an end to the evening as we might hope.”

Alec doesn’t argue. Leonid isn’t even sure he _could_. Instead, he leans hard against Leonid as they begin walking their way toward the manor Leonid has pointedly avoided since the fortnight after he turned seventeen. Nearly a year and he’s not been back, because drawing close means feeling at once the nausea that lives in his stomach and the same, vile desire he can’t burn from his bones.

It’s the latter that still frightens him, more than anything else. Another weakness. But with Alec at his side, at least he stands a chance. At least he has some small measure of safety, Leonid thinks.

They walk by the edge of the harbour. Leonid hopes the sea air might bring Alec to at least some of his senses. Instead, he has to keep a firm hold of his friend’s arm, so Alec doesn’t stumble toward the water.

Overhead, the night is dark as ink. Any stars overhead refuse to be seen, hiding in shadow and cloud and the promise of rain.

Alec stiffens when they turn toward Aldon’s manner. “Where are you _taking_ me,” a slurred question.

“Home,” Leonid grinds out, staring at the hauntingly familiar road. One he has only ever seen at night, at least since he took up with Aldon. Nights too much like this one to make him feel anything but unsteady now. Anything other than weak and anxious, heart fluttering. A moth that will beat its wings to dust and ruin.

“ _His_ house? Ha!” A barbed and bitter laugh tears from Alec’s mouth. He straightens, shoves a curl of hair from his damp forehead as he leans away from Leonid for a moment to squint through the darkness. “Don’t live there anymore. I quit. I’m at the boarding house now, the one by the Twisted Knot.”

Leonid stares at him. “You _quit_.”

_Bad day_ , he’d said, half-drunk. _Without a penny to my name_.

It’s not easy to find work in Ostwick, and if Alec has quit, he’ll be without a reference. He’s only ever _been_ a servant, and working for Aldon was a fall enough from grace: the man is hardly an upstanding citizen.

Alec sways on his feet, eyes dark, mouth turned downward at the corners. “Couldn’t watch him keep doing it, not again. Not after you. Making the next one into just what he wanted, and passing him around, and then cutting him loose. Piece of shit, he is. Don’t have the stomach for it anymore.”

Leonid says nothing, because there’s nothing to say. Instead, he again hauls Alec’s arm around his shoulders and turns toward the side-street that houses the Twisted Knot. Inside of his chest, his heart beats a sickening rhythm, at once an ache of remembered anguish and a warmth he doesn’t want to name.

To have made himself destitute on _Leonid’s_ behalf. To have seen the wrong, to have known it and –

Leonid can’t think of it. It threatens to crack open the walls he’s put in place around his heart, to open the floodgates and let the whole of it spill out – the furious hurt, the lingering infection, the frantic and fragile softness beneath it all.

Alec’s head lolls against his shoulder, and he blinks up at Leonid through his thick eyelashes. “You, though – you were going to take me _there_. You can’t _go_ there. Haven’t, since it all happened.”

Leonid fixes his stare on the road before them, dark though it may be. Ignores the weakness in his knees and the tightness in his throat and pushes through to who he would rather be. Who he _must_ be in this world. “Well,” he says slowly, holding Alec’s thin wrist hard so that his friend stays upright, “I’d be very cross if you died. You still haven’t broken your rule, and I’m due a good lay.”

Alec laughs, a wet sound against the fabric of Leonid’s shoulder. “ _Single-minded_ , you are. You’ll be pining your whole damned life after me.”

Silence, as they turn a corner, stumble past a man and a woman smoking outside of a brothel. Then, “Though your birthday _is_ coming up.” Alec sniffs, blinking blearily at Leonid. “Maybe just once. For you.” Chased by an intimate, soft smile that’s like a chisel to the walls inside of Leonid. Another blow, and he might break.

Leonid finds the boarding house and hauls his friend inside. Heartsick with an ugly need, a weakening desire.

Alec fumbles with the key at the door of his room, but they make it in. It’s narrow and dark and smells of cats, but Alec collapses heavily on the bed, nuzzling the thin pillow as his eyes flutter shut.

Leonid hesitates, in the dark and cramped space. As he stands by an uneven wardrobe, a chair that’s missing a leg. Across the back of it, a fold of golden fabric – one that makes his stomach twist, and also speeds his heartbeat. He’s _kept_ it. Leonid would have thought he sold the robe; it’s fine enough to have fetched an excellent price.

He takes a step forward toward the edge of the narrow bed.

“You can’t stay,” breathes Alec, words loose at the edges, throat ragged. “Rule number two, Leonid.”

“Maker knows I wouldn’t _want_ to,” says Leonid, pulse hammering against his eardrums. He laughs, brittle, as Alec sinks into an almost immediate sleep, then turns and leaves the room and the dirty little boarding house.

All the way back he thinks of Alec’s head against his shoulder. Alec, in a tiny and filthy little room because of Leonid. Alec, who might break the rules for him. Who may yet undo the knots Leonid’s tied inside his own heart – who has already changed him indelibly.

_We are what we’re made to be_ , he said once, and as Leonid wanders his way back through the empty streets toward home, hands shoved in his pockets and skin buzzing, he thinks that Alec is making him into something better than he was. His whole family can go fuck themselves. This is who he would rather be – bright as the moon and entirely free, with a friend who would see him safe no matter the cost.


	5. v

_**v** _

His birthday comes and goes, and there’s no sign of Alec. Leonid makes the usual rounds on his own, finding many a port in this peculiar storm – he hardly has need of the stars above when there’s drink to be had and a birthday to celebrate with a blacksmith and mercenary who find him, and each other, irresistibly attractive.

Still, it sets his nerves on edge. Perhaps, he thinks, Alec’s been out looking for other work. Perhaps he’s had to visit elsewhere to line up new employment. Though of course Leonid is of the opinion that he should be at the top of everyone’s list of priorities, he recognizes that, for those without as much coin as he has, for those without his title, however readily he drags it through the mud, the world is necessarily shaped by different needs.

But the days slip by, and still Alec is nowhere to be found. Eventually, the worry sharpens to a point even alcohol and sex can’t dull, and Leonid sets out to find his friend.

_You missed my birthday_ , he’ll say when finally they meet again. _You do realize that now you’ll need to work even harder to make up for it. Rules one and two, perhaps. A man only turns eighteen once_.

Leonid traces his way to the boarding house where Alec’s been staying one overcast afternoon. He pauses at the brothel for a moment to catch a quick drink and chat up one of the workers who he’s been eyeing for awhile. He has coin enough to pay the man, but Leonid would _far_ rather win him with his own virtues.

The man smiles sweetly enough, but it’s a mask Leonid knows too intimately to believe. He takes his leave and wanders down the street to the decrepit doorway that will lead him to the answers he needs.

Leonid opens the door and enters the dingy little lobby. Boards creak at the back of the house as a woman wanders out, eyes lined with exhaustion, skin sallow. She looks him up and down, taking in the cut of his clothes, the shape of his boot, the care he’s put into his appearance. “Brothel’s down the street, love,” she supplies finally, voice a rasp.

“Already been,” he says, leaning against the little table in the entryway. “I’m actually looking for a friend of mine – he’s renting a room on the third floor. Alec. Doesn’t eat near enough to counterbalance all the drinking, and smokes like a chimney. Half as handsome as I am. Much more common looking.”

The woman blinks at him for a silent moment, face stiff. Between her painted eyebrows, a deep crease appears. “Oh darling,” she says, slow and soft, “if I’d known someone would come looking for his things, I’d have kept them. Didn’t think he – had anyone.”

The world around him grinds to a halt, his heart plummeting down, down, down. He must be breathing, but he can’t feel it; must be alive, though he feels cold as ice, from finger to the place where his heart used to live.

“Had.” He repeats the word in question, though he can’t breathe.

Alec’s left, then. Alec’s gone and _left_ him –

The woman steps forward. “He’s dead, child. Not sure if he drowned himself or had too much to drink or, Maker forbid, ran afoul of someone – but they hauled him from the water last week.”

It’s ridiculous, he thinks distantly. Impossible. How –

“They can’t be _sure_ ,” Leonid says, words echoing again and again in his ears. Hollow little syllables, vacant little sounds. “Not – How could anyone _know_?”

“Found his key in his pocket and had me take a look. He wasn’t in the best of conditions when they hauled him out, but looked enough like himself for us to be sure – that, on top of the key and his disappearance. I _am_ sorry, precious.” She reaches out with one spindly hand and catches one of his own, which curls stiff by his side.

Leonid tears his hand away, staring wide-eyed at the woman before him. “Nothing a strong drink won’t cure,” he says, too loud in the little space. Too loud. The words taste acrid on his tongue, burn as they leave his mouth. “It’s what he’d want, in any case.” Would gasp at the end of the sentence, head buzzing with clotted darkness, but he can’t be seen –

He can’t –

Leonid bolts out the door, heart thudding against his ribs. Each beat like the twist of a knife. Dead. Drowned. Gone.

He walks until he can’t feel his legs any longer, until the wind has chafed his skin raw, until the nausea rising inside of him turns mean enough that he has to stop and vomit into a gutter. He scrubs furiously at his mouth, eyes prickling with tears.

Alec, dead.

It’s _absurd_. This is a version of the world that makes no sense: if before he found the stars above him inverted, this is a sky without stars. Without light or sound or colour – just the Void. Black from horizon to horizon, above and below. Nothing but emptiness.

_I’d be very cross if you died_ , Leonid had said. _You’ll be pining your whole damned life after me_ , Alec laughed, eyes soft and unfocused, smile – just for Leonid.

A sound starts in the base of his gut and claws its way up his ragged throat, breaking free. It might be a laugh; it could be a sob. He’s lost the ability to tell, his ears too full of cotton to make sense of the world around him.

In the distance, he can see the sign for the Roasted Pig. Leonid stumbles in and walks to the bar. He slams a pile of coin on the tacky surface, the familiar barkeep staring at him in surprise. “Free drinks for everyone until it runs out,” Leonid says numbly.

The tavern grows louder, merriment thick in the air. Leonid tosses back several fingers of rum, then chases it with more. This is something he _will_ burn from himself, this feeling: the hollowness in his chest, the empty silence where once he had a heart.

Impossible to think that a void has palpable weight, but it does. Absence becomes presence: Alec, always at Leonid’s side with his ready smile, his dark curls and tapping fingers and wry jokes. Gone. A weight to the nothingness, one that shoves Leonid down and down and down to an abyss from which there can be no crawling out.

In one dark corner, Leonid catches a glimpse of curls. A brown wrist hovering over a glass as long fingers trace the circular edge.

It’s not Alec. Leonid doesn’t even mistake the man for a moment.

Indeed, he looks more like Leonid: has the same dark expression, forehead creased, stare distant. A look Leonid recognizes, that particular hurt. The endless, sickening ache of heartbreak.

He feels it now in his own chest, only larger than he’d ever imagined. A void that will swallow him whole and never, ever spit him back up again.

Leonid grabs another drink and winds his way past delighted patrons, hands slapping his shoulder in gratitude, lingering sometimes for a moment too long. He moves past tables and chairs and games of Wicked Grace or Diamondback or dice to the table where the man sits, staring emptily at the table before him.

He sets the glass on the table before the man, who jerks back and blinks up at him.

“Now, now,” Leonid says, flashing a bright smile that’s a lie – but a lie he would have himself believe. His chest is an empty ache, his fingers numb, but the words so familiar as to be beyond thinking about. For a moment, he can feel Alec by his side: how delighted he would be to hear Leonid say the words that follow. To know they’re words he has remembered, pressed deep into his bones until they became a part of him. How wretched they feel in his mouth, though, how hollow and how haunted. “It’s too lovely a night, and far too handsome a face, for _that_ look, precious.”

*


End file.
